The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed subject matter.
Recent years have witnessed dramatic surges in bandwidth demand. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, wireless Internet bandwidth demand will increase at a compound rate of 108% over the next five years. Relying solely on technology developments such as long term evolution (LTE) and WiMAX to increase the supply of wireless capacity is no longer viable going forward in the next decade. Pricing innovations must also be considered to regulate demand.
Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), both wireless and wireline broadband access providers such as AT&T and Comcast, address the problem of growing bandwidth demands by using usage-based pricing. Yet pricing based just on monthly bandwidth usage still leaves a timescale mismatch: ISP revenue is based on monthly usage, but peak-hour congestion dominates its cost structure. Ideally, ISPs would like bandwidth consumption to be spread evenly over all the hours of the day.
To solve the problem of congestion, some ISPs have been experimenting with different pricing schemes for voice traffic. There are two such schemes in practice, time-dependent pricing and congestion-dependent pricing. Time-dependent pricing for voice calls is in use by some ISPs in India, while congestion-dependent pricing for voice traffic is used by MTN in Africa. However, neither time-dependent nor congestion-dependent pricing for data traffic has been used.
Time-dependent pricing for data traffic is the subject matter of this invention, which provides a system and methods to enable such pricing. Time-dependent Usage-based Broadband Price Engineering (TUBE) is a term that will be used in the following to denote such a system. Described herein are theory, algorithms, and a full system implementation for this new pricing system and methods.